what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

The British Malaise – a 40 year case-study of neoliberalism

The last post made the rather tongue-in-cheek suggestion that my failure to include psychology in a list of intellectual disciplines was a Freudian slip – revealing an inbuilt Presbyterian suspicion of the subject. But that can’t be quite true because, at University, an influential Politics tutor had been the Romanian Zevedei Barbu who had in 1956 just produced his “Democracy and Dictatorship – their psychology and patterns of life” and, subsequently, I became a fan of the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers and his On Becoming a Person (1961). So let’s just say that, from 1968, politics was for me the predominant force – and it was the late 1980s before some bouts of depression gave me cause to think about psychological factors. In those days, you didn’t own up to such a condition and the only book I could find on the subject was Dorothy Rowe’s Depression – the way out of your prison (1983)

This, of course, was the point at which Britain was being subjected the early stages of what is now a 40 year period of neoliberalism and James Davies’ Sedated – how modern capitalism created our mental health crisis (2021) is one of the first books to deal with that experiment from the psychological point of view. He starts with an important point about DEBT

Up until the 1970s, having personal debt beyond a mortgage held a certain stigma. If you took on any debt at all, it had to be for investment purposes. Other forms of debt (to consume, to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ or to ‘make ends meet’) were largely considered off-limits. A combination of tight cultural mores and credit regulations therefore kept household debt low throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. But owing to deregulatory and structural changes to the economy, public attitudes soon liberalised, making the adoption of debt almost essential to modern living. From the 1980s onwards, as borrowing became more ubiquitous, young adults in their twenties and thirties were 50 per cent more likely to take on debt than their equivalents living in the three previous decades. Being indebted was quickly being normalised. And with this, the very psychological outlook of those indebted began changing too. Owning increasing amounts of debt was altering the complexion of how people envisaged themselves and their future, creating mass shifts in attitude and behaviour not seen before.

I very much belong to that older generation for whom debt was unacceptable. Davies then moves on to explore how the world of work has been affected – with horrific statistics on the mental stress produced by the new performance culture of largely meaningless jobs

A History of Modern Psychology Duane and Sydney Schulz (2011) is a fascinating and well-written account of the development of the discipline – with a strong focus on the US – but written by an historian and psychologist. It’s very strong on the role of intellectual currents and social context in introducing and then challenging fashionable ideas. Interestingly, it’s p 300 before Freud makes his entrance!

Monday, June 24, 2019

Reason as the servant of Passion

One of the delights of my house in the Carpathian Mountains is the library – with books cascading from shelving which started almost 20 years ago with a magnificent oak bookshelf and now bulge over doors, windows, corners and alcoves – anywhere not already invaded by paintings….
Coming back to the house immediately exposes me to a rich serendipity of texts many of which have lain there for years. Or which demand - and repay - rereading.
This past week has therefore been a bit of a reading week for me and I would like to share some of the gems I’ve come across not only in each of those two categories - but in a third one which is becoming more significant these days – the “virtual” one.   

The Righteous Mind – why good people are divided by politics and religion” by Jonathan Haidt (2012) has lain undisturbed on my shelves since it arrived 4 years ago – but is one of the best psychological treatments of political issues I have read. And that includes Leo Abse’s dissection of leading politicians - “Private Member” (1973) which was bettered only by Alaister Mant’s strangely neglected “Leaders we Deserve”.
Psychologists were, of course, in the van of the reaction (which started a decade or so ago) against the overly rationalistic explanations of events - Thinking Fast and Slow; Daniel Kahneman (2012) is probably the best known of these - although it's too technical and dense for me. He may have won a Nobel prize but I gave up after a few pages - and had the same reaction just now when I pulled it down from another shelf
George Lakoff is a psychologist - and much more readable - who has been exploring this terrain - and that of "framing" (see recommended reading) - for more than two decades eg “Moral Politics – how Liberals and Politics Think” (1996); and The Political Mind – a cognitive scientist’s guide to your brain and its politics (2008).
 

Haidt’s treatment, however, shines for three reasons – first, it takes us beyond the narrow scope of a specialist and brings in, to illustrate his points, the wisdom of such writers as social philosopher David Hume and sociologist Emile Durkheim. Indeed Hume’s quip about “passion being the servant of reason” serves as the trigger for the text  
The core of the book, secondly, rests on what he identifies as six moral foundations of society viz the care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation; and liberty/oppression dichotomies. He then uses this classification to suggest that the strength of the political right is their understanding of the importance of this entire range – whereas the left tend to emphasise only half of the range of values…
The final strength of the book is the way it’s structured – with the 5-6 key points of each chapter being clearly laid out and summarized. I’m an impatient reader (there are too many other interesting books waiting) and this made it much easier to skim…

It also uses the occasional diagram (something I always appreciate) one of which classifies people according to the extent to which they express EMPATHY (or “feeling for others” axis one) or SYSTEMISATION (or “classifying things or concepts” - axis two). Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant both figure in the bottom right quadrant (sociable Kant less so than the almost autistic father of utilitarianism). 

But the diagram made me realise that I too fall into that same bottom right quadrant! 
I may be a Leo but of the more retiring sort - as I learned when I took the Belbin test expecting to be confirmed as a Leader but was exposed as a "resource person". 
I was always more of a networker – if one with a strong penchant for books and typologies

Recommended Reading/viewing
The whole issue of "framing" (story-telling) is quite fascinating and is becoming a major issue as we increasingly understand the scale of both government and corporate leaders' manipulation of us all over the past century
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/07/stories-we-tell.html
Storytelling - bewitching the modern mind; Christian Salmon (2010) an epub which needs conversion to pdf
The Common Cause Handbook (2010)
Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions; Keith Grint (2008)
Don’t Think of an Elephant – know your values and frame the debate”; George Lakoff (2004)